oxide intoxication, and reported them in print. One conclusion was forced
upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since
remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational
consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness,
whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie
potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through
life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus,
and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of
mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and
adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which
leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard
them is the question,—for they are so discontinuous with ordinary
consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish
formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate,
they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality. Looking back
on my own experiences, they all converge towards a kind of insight to
which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance. The keynote
of it is invariably a reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of the
world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and
troubles, were melted into unity. Not only do they, as contrasted species,
belong to one and the same genus, but _one of the species_, the nobler and
better one, _is itself the genus, and so soaks up and absorbs its opposite
into itself_. This is a dark saying, I know, when thus expressed in terms
of common logic, but I cannot wholly escape from its authority. I feel as
if it must mean something, something like what the Hegelian philosophy
means, if one could only lay hold of it more clearly. Those who have ears
to hear, let them hear; to me the living sense of its reality only comes
in the artificial mystic state of mind.(231)
I just now spoke of friends who believe in the anæsthetic revelation. For
them too it is a monistic insight, in which the _other_ in its various
forms appears absorbed into the One.
“Into this pervading genius,” writes one of them, “we pass,
forgetting and forgotten, and thenceforth each is all, in God.
There is no higher, no deeper, no other, than the life in which we
are founded. ‘The One remains, the many change and pass;’ and each
and every one of us _is_ the One that remains.... This is the
ultimatum.... As sure as being—whence is all our care—so sure is
content, beyond duplexity, antithesis, or trouble, where I have
triumphed in a solitude that God is not above.”(232)
This has the genuine religious mystic ring! I just now quoted J. A.
Symonds. He also records a mystical experience with chloroform, as
follows:—
“After the choking and stifling had passed away, I seemed at first
in a state of utter blankness; then came flashes of intense light,
alternating with blackness, and with a keen vision of what was
going on in the room around me, but no sensation of touch. I
thought that I was near death; when, suddenly, my soul became
aware of God, who was manifestly dealing with me, handling me, so
to speak, in an intense personal present reality. I felt him
streaming in like light upon me.... I cannot describe the ecstasy
I felt. Then, as I gradually awoke from the influence of the
anæsthetics, the old sense of my relation to the world began to
return, the new sense of my relation to God began to fade. I
suddenly leapt to my feet on the chair where I was sitting, and
shrieked out, ‘It is too horrible, it is too horrible, it is too
horrible,’ meaning that I could not bear this disillusionment.
Then I flung myself on the ground, and at last awoke covered with
blood, calling to the two surgeons (who were frightened), ‘Why did
you not kill me? Why would you not let me die?’ Only think of it.
To have felt for that long dateless ecstasy of vision the very
God, in all purity and tenderness and truth and absolute love, and
then to find that I had after all had no revelation, but that I
had been tricked by the abnormal excitement of my brain.
“Yet, this question remains, Is it possible that the inner sense
of reality which succeeded, when my flesh was dead to impressions
from without, to the ordinary sense of physical relations, was not
a delusion but an actual experience? Is it possible that I, in
that moment, felt what some of the saints have said they always
felt, the undemonstrable but irrefragable certainty of God?”(233)
With this we make connection with religious mysticism pure and simple.
Symonds’s question takes us back to those examples which you will remember
my quoting in the lecture on the Reality of the Unseen, of sudden
realization of the immediate presence of God. The phenomenon in one shape
or another is not uncommon.
“I know,” writes Mr. Trine, “an officer on our police force who
has told me that many times when off duty, and on his way home in
the evening, there comes to him such a vivid and vital realization
of his oneness with this Infinite Power, and this Spirit of
Infinite Peace so takes hold of and so fills him, that it seems as
if his feet could hardly keep to the pavement, so buoyant and so
exhilarated does he become by reason of this inflowing tide.”(234)
Certain aspects of nature seem to have a peculiar power of awakening such
mystical moods.(235) Most of the striking cases which I have collected
have occurred out of doors. Literature has commemorated this fact in many
passages of great beauty—this extract, for example, from Amiel’s Journal
Intime:—
“Shall I ever again have any of those prodigious reveries which
sometimes came to me in former days? One day, in youth, at
sunrise, sitting in the ruins of the castle of Faucigny; and again
in the mountains, under the noonday sun, above Lavey, lying at the
foot of a tree and visited by three butterflies; once more at
night upon the shingly shore of the Northern Ocean, my back upon
the sand and my vision ranging through the milky way;—such grand
and spacious, immortal, cosmogonic reveries, when one reaches to
the stars, when one owns the infinite! Moments divine, ecstatic
hours; in which our thought flies from world to world, pierces the
great enigma, breathes with a respiration broad, tranquil, and
deep as the respiration of the ocean, serene and limitless as the
blue firmament; ... instants of irresistible intuition in which
one feels one’s self great as the universe, and calm as a god....
What hours, what memories! The vestiges they leave behind are
enough to fill us with belief and enthusiasm, as if they were
visits of the Holy Ghost.”(236)
Here is a similar record from the memoirs of that interesting German
idealist, Malwida von Meysenbug:—
“I was alone upon the seashore as all these thoughts flowed over
me, liberating and reconciling; and now again, as once before in
distant days in the Alps of Dauphiné, I was impelled to kneel
down, this time before the illimitable ocean, symbol of the
Infinite. I felt that I prayed as I had never prayed before, and
knew now what prayer really is: to return from the solitude of
individuation into the consciousness of unity with all that is, to
kneel down as one that passes away, and to rise up as one
imperishable. Earth, heaven, and sea resounded as in one vast
world‐encircling harmony. It was as if the chorus of all the great
who had ever lived were about me. I felt myself one with them, and
it appeared as if I heard their greeting: ‘Thou too belongest to
the company of those who overcome.’ ”(237)
The well‐known passage from Walt Whitman is a classical expression of this
sporadic type of mystical experience.
“I believe in you, my Soul ...
Loaf with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat;...
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.
I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning.
Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that
pass all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers and the women
my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love.”(238)
I could easily give more instances, but one will suffice. I take it from
the Autobiography of J. Trevor.(239)
“One brilliant Sunday morning, my wife and boys went to the
Unitarian Chapel in Macclesfield. I felt it impossible to
accompany them—as though to leave the sunshine on the hills, and
go down there to the chapel, would be for the time an act of
spiritual suicide. And I felt such need for new inspiration and
expansion in my life. So, very reluctantly and sadly, I left my
wife and boys to go down into the town, while I went further up
into the hills with my stick and my dog. In the loveliness of the
morning, and the beauty of the hills and valleys, I soon lost my
sense of sadness and regret. For nearly an hour I walked along the
road to the ‘Cat and Fiddle,’ and then returned. On the way back,
suddenly, without warning, I felt that I was in Heaven—an inward
state of peace and joy and assurance indescribably intense,
accompanied with a sense of being bathed in a warm glow of light,
as though the external condition had brought about the internal
effect—a feeling of having passed beyond the body, though the
scene around me stood out more clearly and as if nearer to me than
before, by reason of the illumination in the midst of which I
seemed to be placed. This deep emotion lasted, though with
decreasing strength, until I reached home, and for some time
after, only gradually passing away.”
The writer adds that having had further experiences of a similar sort, he
now knows them well.
“The spiritual life,” he writes, “justifies itself to those who
live it; but what can we say to those who do not understand? This,
at least, we can say, that it is a life whose experiences are
proved real to their possessor, because they remain with him when
brought closest into contact with the objective realities of life.
Dreams cannot stand this test. We wake from them to find that they
are but dreams. Wanderings of an overwrought brain do not stand
this test. These highest experiences that I have had of God’s
presence have been rare and brief—flashes of consciousness which
have compelled me to exclaim with surprise—God is _here_!—or
conditions of exaltation and insight, less intense, and only
gradually passing away. I have severely questioned the worth of
these moments. To no soul have I named them, lest I should be
building my life and work on mere phantasies of the brain. But I
find that, after every questioning and test, they stand out to‐day
as the most real experiences of my life, and experiences which
have explained and justified and unified all past experiences and
all past growth. Indeed, their reality and their far‐reaching
significance are ever becoming more clear and evident. When they
came, I was living the fullest, strongest, sanest, deepest life. I
was not seeking them. What I was seeking, with resolute
determination, was to live more intensely my own life, as against
what I knew would be the adverse judgment of the world. It was in
the most real seasons that the Real Presence came, and I was aware
that I was immersed in the infinite ocean of God.”(240)
Even the least mystical of you must by this time be convinced of the
existence of mystical moments as states of consciousness of an entirely
specific quality, and of the deep impression which they make on those who
have them. A Canadian psychiatrist, Dr. R. M. Bucke, gives to the more
distinctly characterized of these phenomena the name of cosmic
consciousness. “Cosmic consciousness in its more striking instances is
not,” Dr. Bucke says, “simply an expansion or extension of the self‐
conscious mind with which we are all familiar, but the superaddition of a
function as distinct from any possessed by the average man as
_self_‐consciousness is distinct from any function possessed by one of the
higher animals.”
“The prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness is a
consciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the
universe. Along with the consciousness of the cosmos there occurs
an intellectual enlightenment which alone would place the
individual on a new plane of existence—would make him almost a
member of a new species. To this is added a state of moral
exaltation, an indescribable feeling of elevation, elation, and
joyousness, and a quickening of the moral sense, which is fully as
striking, and more important than is the enhanced intellectual
power. With these come what may be called a sense of immortality,
a consciousness of eternal life, not a conviction that he shall
have this, but the consciousness that he has it already.”(241)
It was Dr. Bucke’s own experience of a typical onset of cosmic
consciousness in his own person which led him to investigate it in others.
He has printed his conclusions in a highly interesting volume, from which
I take the following account of what occurred to him:—
“I had spent the evening in a great city, with two friends,
reading and discussing poetry and philosophy. We parted at
midnight. I had a long drive in a hansom to my lodging. My mind,
deeply under the influence of the ideas, images, and emotions
called up by the reading and talk, was calm and peaceful. I was in
a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment, not actually thinking,
but letting ideas, images, and emotions flow of themselves, as it
were, through my mind. All at once, without warning of any kind, I
found myself wrapped in a flame‐colored cloud. For an instant I
thought of fire, an immense conflagration somewhere close by in
that great city; the next, I knew that the fire was within myself.
Directly afterward there came upon me a sense of exultation, of
immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an
intellectual illumination impossible to describe. Among other
things, I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the
universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary,
a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life.
It was not a conviction that I would have eternal life, but a
consciousness that I possessed eternal life then; I saw that all
men are immortal; that the cosmic order is such that without any
peradventure all things work together for the good of each and
all; that the foundation principle of the world, of all the
worlds, is what we call love, and that the happiness of each and
all is in the long run absolutely certain. The vision lasted a few
seconds and was gone; but the memory of it and the sense of the
reality of what it taught has remained during the quarter of a
century which has since elapsed. I knew that what the vision
showed was true. I had attained to a point of view from which I
saw that it must be true. That view, that conviction, I may say
that consciousness, has never, even during periods of the deepest
depression, been lost.”(242)
We have now seen enough of this cosmic or mystic consciousness, as it
comes sporadically. We must next pass to its methodical cultivation as an
element of the religious life. Hindus, Buddhists, Mohammedans, and
Christians all have cultivated it methodically.
In India, training in mystical insight has been known from time immemorial
under the name of yoga. Yoga means the experimental union of the
individual with the divine. It is based on persevering exercise; and the
diet, posture, breathing, intellectual concentration, and moral discipline
vary slightly in the different systems which teach it. The yogi, or
disciple, who has by these means overcome the obscurations of his lower
nature sufficiently, enters into the condition termed _samâdhi_, “and
comes face to face with facts which no instinct or reason can ever know.”
He learns—
“That the mind itself has a higher state of existence, beyond
reason, a superconscious state, and that when the mind gets to
that higher state, then this knowledge beyond reasoning comes....
All the different steps in yoga are intended to bring us
scientifically to the superconscious state or samâdhi.... Just as
unconscious work is beneath consciousness, so there is another
work which is above consciousness, and which, also, is not
accompanied with the feeling of egoism.... There is no feeling of
_I_, and yet the mind works, desireless, free from restlessness,
objectless, bodiless. Then the Truth shines in its full
effulgence, and we know ourselves—for Samâdhi lies potential in us
all—for what we truly are, free, immortal, omnipotent, loosed from
the finite, and its contrasts of good and evil altogether, and
identical with the Atman or Universal Soul.”(243)
The Vedantists say that one may stumble into superconsciousness
sporadically, without the previous discipline, but it is then impure.
Their test of its purity, like our test of religion’s value, is empirical:
its fruits must be good for life. When a man comes out of Samâdhi, they
assure us that he remains “enlightened, a sage, a prophet, a saint, his
whole character changed, his life changed, illumined.”(244)
The Buddhists use the word “samâdhi” as well as the Hindus; but “dhyâna”
is their special word for higher states of contemplation. There seem to be
four stages recognized in dhyâna. The first stage comes through
concentration of the mind upon one point. It excludes desire, but not
discernment or judgment: it is still intellectual. In the second stage the
intellectual functions drop off, and the satisfied sense of unity remains.
In the third stage the satisfaction departs, and indifference begins,
along with memory and self‐consciousness. In the fourth stage the
indifference, memory, and self‐consciousness are perfected. [Just what
“memory” and “self‐consciousness” mean in this connection is doubtful.
They cannot be the faculties familiar to us in the lower life.] Higher
stages still of contemplation are mentioned—a region where there exists
nothing, and where the meditator says: “There exists absolutely nothing,”
and stops. Then he reaches another region where he says: “There are
neither ideas nor absence of ideas,” and stops again. Then another region
where, “having reached the end of both idea and perception, he stops
finally.” This would seem to be, not yet Nirvâna, but as close an approach
to it as this life affords.(245)
In the Mohammedan world the Sufi sect and various dervish bodies are the
possessors of the mystical tradition. The Sufis have existed in Persia
from the earliest times, and as their pantheism is so at variance with the
hot and rigid monotheism of the Arab mind, it has been suggested that
Sufism must have been inoculated into Islam by Hindu influences. We
Christians know little of Sufism, for its secrets are disclosed only to
those initiated. To give its existence a certain liveliness in your minds,
I will quote a Moslem document, and pass away from the subject.
Al‐Ghazzali, a Persian philosopher and theologian, who flourished in the
eleventh century, and ranks as one of the greatest doctors of the Moslem
church, has left us one of the few autobiographies to be found outside of
Christian literature. Strange that a species of book so abundant among
ourselves should be so little represented elsewhere—the absence of
strictly personal confessions is the chief difficulty to the purely
literary student who would like to become acquainted with the inwardness
of religions other than the Christian.
M. Schmölders has translated a part of Al‐Ghazzali’s autobiography into
French:(246)—
“The Science of the Sufis,” says the Moslem author, “aims at
detaching the heart from all that is not God, and at giving to it
for sole occupation the meditation of the divine being. Theory
being more easy for me than practice, I read [certain books] until
I understood all that can be learned by study and hearsay. Then I
recognized that what pertains most exclusively to their method is
just what no study can grasp, but only transport, ecstasy, and the
transformation of the soul. How great, for example, is the
difference between knowing the definitions of health, of satiety,
with their causes and conditions, and being really healthy or
filled. How different to know in what drunkenness consists,—as
being a state occasioned by a vapor that rises from the
stomach,—and _being_ drunk effectively. Without doubt, the drunken
man knows neither the definition of drunkenness nor what makes it
interesting for science. Being drunk, he knows nothing; whilst the
physician, although not drunk, knows well in what drunkenness
consists, and what are its predisposing conditions. Similarly
there is a difference between knowing the nature of abstinence,
and _being_ abstinent or having one’s soul detached from the
world.—Thus I had learned what words could teach of Sufism, but
what was left could be learned neither by study nor through the
ears, but solely by giving one’s self up to ecstasy and leading a
pious life.
“Reflecting on my situation, I found myself tied down by a
multitude of bonds—temptations on every side. Considering my
teaching, I found it was impure before God. I saw myself
struggling with all my might to achieve glory and to spread my
name. [Here follows an account of his six months’ hesitation to
break away from the conditions of his life at Bagdad, at the end
of which he fell ill with a paralysis of the tongue.] Then,
feeling my own weakness, and having entirely given up my own will,
I repaired to God like a man in distress who has no more
resources. He answered, as he answers the wretch who invokes him.
My heart no longer felt any difficulty in renouncing glory,
wealth, and my children. So I quitted Bagdad, and reserving from
my fortune only what was indispensable for my subsistence, I
distributed the rest. I went to Syria, where I remained about two
years, with no other occupation than living in retreat and
solitude, conquering my desires, combating my passions, training
myself to purify my soul, to make my character perfect, to prepare
my heart for meditating on God—all according to the methods of the
Sufis, as I had read of them.
“This retreat only increased my desire to live in solitude, and to
complete the purification of my heart and fit it for meditation.
But the vicissitudes of the times, the affairs of the family, the
need of subsistence, changed in some respects my primitive
resolve, and interfered with my plans for a purely solitary life.
I had never yet found myself completely in ecstasy, save in a few
single hours; nevertheless, I kept the hope of attaining this
state. Every time that the accidents led me astray, I sought to
return; and in this situation I spent ten years. During this
solitary state things were revealed to me which it is impossible
either to describe or to point out. I recognized for certain that
the Sufis are assuredly walking in the path of God. Both in their
acts and in their inaction, whether internal or external, they are
illumined by the light which proceeds from the prophetic source.
The first condition for a Sufi is to purge his heart entirely of
all that is not God. The next key of the contemplative life
consists in the humble prayers which escape from the fervent soul,
and in the meditations on God in which the heart is swallowed up
entirely. But in reality this is only the beginning of the Sufi
life, the end of Sufism being total absorption in God. The
intuitions and all that precede are, so to speak, only the
threshold for those who enter. From the beginning, revelations
take place in so flagrant a shape that the Sufis see before them,
whilst wide awake, the angels and the souls of the prophets. They
hear their voices and obtain their favors. Then the transport
rises from the perception of forms and figures to a degree which
escapes all expression, and which no man may seek to give an
account of without his words involving sin.